Wednesday, August 29, 2012

There has recently been a growing and
disturbing trend whereby right-wing idealogues, organizations, and
terrorists have been presented in the media as being
“anti-government” or even anarchists. This effectively serves to confuse the public about the philosophy of
anarchism and what anarchists actually stand for. And this practice
will, undoubtedly, have negative consequences for actual anarchist
communities.

This inaccurate media portrayal of right wing extremists really caught my attention after
the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin – when Amy Goodman subsequently interviewed a
former DHS analyst on the subject of “right-wing extremists.” In
that interview her guest dismissed the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a racist and no mention of his Christian fundamentalism was put
forward. He was described primarily as being involved with “anti-government” militias. This despite the fact that McVeigh
constantly praised the Turner Diaries (a novel that romanticizes a
race war), which he sold below cost at gun shows, and despite the
fact that he was associated with the fundamentalist Christian Identity movement.
And, actually, McVeigh was not really anti-government. Rather, he was
merely opposed to certain aspects of the government currently in
charge. So, while I am a frequent member of DemocracyNow's audience,
I think Ms.Goodman dropped the ball in this particular interview and
should have been a little more challenging with her questions.

More to the point along these lines... a prominent headline in the news recently has been about a supposed “anarchist”
cell within the U.S. military which was allegedly planning to carry
out political assassinations, blow up dams, and poison Washington
state's apple orchards. However, despite numerous headline's
referring to them as “anarchists,” when one looked a little
deeper it was discovered that these "anarchists" were actually just “true
patriots” who were essentially looking to take the country
back. Later it was revealed that the alleged ringleader of the group was an usher at the RNC in 2008. Like McVeigh, this group seems to be comprised of fairly
typical right-wing militants – who are not really "anti-government" and
certainly not anarchists.

“Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you're hoping
for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very
badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific
set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it's
very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math,
so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around
us for something other than what we want, and using up all
our resources to do so.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the
concept of the technological singularity... it has to do (generally
speaking) with programming a thinking computer that initially has the
same cognitive abilities as a human being. Due to computers
regularly becoming able to process evermore information faster, in a
very short time, after a computer achieved a human level of
intellect, it would, conceivably, surpass that level – arguably in
the next moment and almost certainly within the next few years. What
would start with a computer being able to pass a Turing test
(basically being able to fool human observers as to whether or not
they were having a dialogue with a human or a computer) would then
shortly be followed by a type of self-consciousness machine that
would intellectually be capable of manipulating humans and taking
human rationality to its furthest degree.